A few things I learned last weekend during Folk Yeah’s Festival in the Forest, an independent music festival at Fernwood Campground in Big Sur featuring Silver Jews, Beach House, Entrance Band, Port O’Brien, Little Wings, Megapuss (Devendra Banhart), and a mountain of other bands:
Big Sur during a Folk Yeah festival most likely has more people on acid per capita than any other place on the planet. On the second night, the Entrance Band dedicated their set to a guy who no one had seen since he wandered off into the woods on an acid trip the night before. Immediately, the guy in question yelled from the audience that he found his way back. Funny story, right. Only, I have the sneaking suspicion that the guy who yelled is just another guy that took acid and the real lost guy is still out there. I don’t know any other place where it becomes almost cliché to take acid at midnight and wander off with a handle of rum.
Devendra Banhart is not a celebrity and no one on an independent label ever will be. When Banhart climbs on stage with Little Joy (a new band featuring Fabrizio Moretti of the Strokes) and sits on stage with them for the entire set except for a very brief stint on the guitar, it’s not cool. Not in the slightest. In fact, if the band wasn’t amazing I would make some angrier statements. Instead I’ll reserve those statements for the half hour he played as Megapuss, a half hour that should have been reserved for masturbating and crying to pictures of Natalie Portman.
John C. Reilly will always be a celebrity. It’s almost impossible for people to get starstruck at these things because everybody is press/artist/friend of the band or super-stoned. However, the moment you spot John C. Reilly, it feels like the elation of losing your virginity mixed with the eventual embarrassment of not being able to stop telling people that you just lost your virginity. And in that vein, I seriously took a shot of rum with John C. Reilly this weekend. I also saw the Silver Jews while standing next to Millie from “Freaks and Geeks.”
The only thing you have to do to hang out with your favorite band is get super wasted. It will most likely be the only time you can get over telling them how much you love their music and say the things you really want to say. Tell Beach House that everyone you know has sex to their albums. Berate them to play R. Kelly covers. Demand to play the high parts on the keyboard during their set. They want you to do these things and most likely you will only feel okay doing them after you start shotgunning cans of Budweiser.
Kyle Field (Little Wings) is the Raymond Carver of folk music. Raymond Carver captured the bizarre juxtapositions of modern life, especially the juxtaposition of any part of life with alcohol. Little Wings’ opening song about a cashier who sells scratchers to a poor man only to find them covered in puke outside of the bar where the cashier went too far with a girl does Carver proud. If you don’t know Carver or Little Wings, seriously get with it because busting out either makes you look super smart and super sensitive. Wink.